at the intersection of philosophy, technology and business

Legendary

An epic tale of tracking down a very strange bug in the Mac version of the canonically nerdy typesetting tool LaTEX. Interesting to observe how debugging happens across a large open-source team without anyone designated as tester or QA.

(Stylistically, I find this to be a compelling use of the character-based narrative format for telling a testing story, a trope I find cloying in many software testing articles. Perhaps it succeeds because in this case the characters are real rather than obviously invented in service of the authorial point.)